Media and Justice

News from Ford

13 February 2013

Shedding Light on a ‘Great Divide’

With support from the foundation, the innovative news website GlobalPost has launched a new section focused on global income inequality. The section, called “The Great Divide,” explores rising inequality in the U.S and around the world, drawing connections between disparate locations and underscoring the pervasiveness of a dire trend. “We wanted to structure economic data to help Americans see that inequality in the U.S. is parallel to inequality in the developing world,” says Charles Sennott, GlobalPost’s co-founder and executive editor.

An interactive map shows how the economic divide in specific U.S. metro areas compares to levels of inequality in major cities around the world, illuminating some surprising parallels. “The Great Divide” also features on the ground reporting that homes in on local experiences of inequality, videos explaining important economic issues in plain language and photographs depicting the distance between rich and poor. It’s an engaging and substantive look at an urgent but underexplored set of issues, and one that is clearly resonating with readers: “The Great Divide” has attracted four times as many page views as an average story on GlobalPost, and readers spend more than five times as long exploring the content.

“We think income inequality is one of the biggest issues of our time. We wanted to create a series to promote a national dialogue about this issue and to get people thinking about solutions,” Sennott says. “The Great Divide” is funded through the foundation’s Justice and Media initiative, which supports journalistic projects that offer information and insight on complex social issues.